Chapter III
30 Becoming an Art Therapist
estly describe and write them down, the student may find such a book1 a tremendous gift.
The fledgling art therapist embarking on a career has immeasur- able pleasures and terrifying, if intriguing, difficulties to look forward to. For a novice to understand that the therapist/writer has survived at least to write a book is genuinely helpful. For a novice to understand that a therapist/writer has grappled with many of the same issues and has come to some conclusions, is, as Isaac Newton said, “standing on the shoulders of giants”2and is a way to pass on history and the most essential learnings of the field to the next generations. Sometimes the student finds that the “giants” were not so competent after all—and that is important learning also. An additional, but not unimportant advan- tage of an art therapy student finding a story which reflects and adds to his or her own, is that it can ease the loneliness many feel of being
“the only one.”
In this chapter, we review three contemporary books which we both found useful for students to read. There were a few more books of this sort—surprisingly few, I thought—but I felt some of these should be titled How to Become a Rotten Therapist, I was so distressed by the content. First come my views and then in another font, the views of my student cowriter are expressed. In a final section called “Kim Newall:
A student’s recommendations,” Kim describes some of her journey through books and highlights Malchiodi’s The Art Therapy Sourcebook (1998 & 2006) and McNiff’s Fundamentals of Art Therapy(1988) which she found particularly useful and inspirational for her way of thinking and imagining art therapy.
Useful as the writings in this chapter may be for all students becoming therapists, few are by and for art therapists; rather they are more generally about becoming a therapist. One book that is by and for art therapists is by Deborah Schroder (2005). A student told me that she had read the Schroder book beforeshe entered a graduate pro-
1. I understand that for many, the use of the word “book” is outdated. In an era of electronic tech- nology encroachment, many don’t read printed books at all. (E.g., I have noticed that the reference lists for articles in the journal Art Therapy: Journal of the American Art Therapy Association,as a rule, no longer include books.) As a person from the old days I use the word “book” here. But it should be understood as all formsfrom which the student can “read.”
2. According to Wikipedia, the contemporary metaphor concerns “one who discovers by building on previous discoveries” and Isaac Newton said, “If I have seen further, it is by standing on the shoulders of giants,” but the original quote was from much earlier (en.Wikipedia.org, retrieved May 2, 2014).
A Good Book Is a Mentor 31 gram as she wanted a way to explore what the field might be like. This reminds, of course, that, during the decision-making process, a smart potential art therapy student searches more broadly about a hoped-for career beyond clinging to what is written on the websites of art thera- py graduate programs. Potential students are about to make a serious and life-changing decision which may cost them much in terms of money and time, work, stress, and personal anguish. It is natural that they would look around for material to read from a senior art thera- pist, in the “before” phase as they go about the process of deciding whether or not to enter graduate school to become an art therapist.
READINGS
Books described and reviewed in this chapter are Annie G. Rogers’
A Shining Affliction,Irvin Yalom’s The Gift of Therapy,and Mary Pipher’s Letters to a Young Therapist. The single art therapy work is called Little Windows Into Art Therapy and was written by Deborah Schroder. It is briefly described here, as well. In addition to Little Windows, Kim Newall relied upon Malchiodi’s Sourcebook of Art Therapy and McNiff’s Fundamentals of Art Therapyand will review them in her section of the chapter.
Rogers’ A Shining Affliction
Rogers’ lovely book is subtitled “A Story of Harm and Healing in Psychotherapy.” Perhaps most importantly for a student, it is a descrip- tion of Rogers’ experience as a psychology student. Reviewing it, the Los Angeles Times termed it “Lyrical, extraordinary . . . Reveals what goes on in the sometimes mysterious encounter between therapist and patient.”
For me, this book was courageous and extremely moving—up there with the very best ever. I read it when it was first published in 1995 and assigned it to my students as required reading. I read it again re - cently, and was pleased to find it still fresh and compelling after all these years. The chapter titles are evocatively simple and mysterious:
“The other side of silence,” “Silence,” “Messenger” “Epilogue” and
“Afterword.”
32 Becoming an Art Therapist
The story integrates and overlaps Rogers’ internship treatment of a tremendously wounded boy with her own deeply hidden trauma.
Finally, her personal traumatic history emerges and causes Rogers to be psychiatrically hospitalized with a breakdown, one symptom of which is that she is unable to speak. With the help of a talented and sensitive therapist and the evolution of time, Rogers is able to trans- form her story into a healing one and, in turn, is able to heal her young client. In A Shining Affliction,Rogers integrates her personal story with her treatment of her patient, her supervision for this case, and her own therapy. Rogers’ accurate rendition of the deep psychic connections between clients and therapist and how they can both change and grow is the best one of its kind I have ever read. She writes:
The psychotherapy relationship is two-sided, whether we acknowl- edge it is or not. Each person brings to that relationship whatever is unrecognized, unknown, and unapproachable in her or his life, and a wish for truths and wholeness. Since one cannot thrive on memo- ries, [or] on a relationship with projections, what keeps alive—the hope of wholeness—is an interchange of love, longing, frustration, and anger in the vicissitudes of a real relationship . . . In any treat- ment situation, it is the therapist who is responsible for holding two stories or two plays, together. The work of sustaining a therapeutic relationship demands a two-sided perspective in order to understand both stories. And the deepening of this relationship over time de - mands honesty and intimacy and sometimes extraordinary courage.
(Rogers, 1995, p. 319)
After she completed her doctoral studies, Rogers became an As - sistant Professor of Human Development and Psychology at the Harv - ard Graduate School and worked on a research project with Carol Gilligan who changed the face and practice of psychology through her challenge to moral development theories which to that time were all based on men and generalized to women. In her classic In a Different Voice, Gilligan argued convincingly that women develop differently.
Annie Rogers is currently Professor of Psychoanalysis and Clinical Psychology and the Dean of Social Sciences at Hampshire College. I highly recommend this book. In fact, I’m thinking of writing Rogers a fan letter.
A Good Book Is a Mentor 33 (KN) Rogers’ book is so beautifully written it was both inspiring and in - timidating for me to use as a point of departure. Her ability to describe her shifting states of consciousness with such candor and self-disclosure creates a document of profound value as she dismantles the barriers between clin- ician and client. In her account, she is both, and she has created a power- ful example of bridging the two. Her compassion resounds from her hard- won healing.
Rogers’ practice of claiming time after each session to digest her ses- sions with children provided fresh and immediate responses to the work she did. I aspired to this practice but fell prey to the pressure to see as many clients back to back as possible in my internship. Finding the time to review and digest the events in a session for me was one of the most chal- lenging aspects of creating my ongoing internship log.
As an artist, I am familiar with the struggle to value time for reflection;
reflection that later becomes the mulch of creation. Rogers knows this ter- ritory because she, too, is an artist, and she describes the importance of her paintings in the process of her own healing. She frequently makes refer- ence to poets like Rilke, Mary Oliver, Martin Heidegger, and Virginia Woolf, and to her art classes as sources of her inspiration. Images are cen- tral to her healing and I appreciate her descriptions of light, color, and sen- sation. Later, when she writes again as an experienced clinician, she is still living in the world of the silent image, employing visual directives such as the “river map,” as a way to remember “. . . something unsayable” (Rogers, p. 2007). Rogers’ sensitivity to the image and the ways the body speaks what words cannot, reminds me of Rilke’s beautiful letters to Franz Xavier Kappus, mentioned in the Preface of this book:
To let each impression, each embryo of a feeling come to completion, en - tirely in itself, in the dark, in the unsayable, the unconscious, beyond the reach of one’s own understanding, and with deep humility and pa tience to wait for the hour when a new clarity is born: this alone is what it means to live as an artist: in understanding as in creating.
Rogers’ gift of her internship account, and her subsequent account titled “The Unsayable: The Hidden Language of Trauma” (2007), offer me the example of a student developing into a seasoned therapist whose work is centered on the powerful image-making of the unconscious.
34 Becoming an Art Therapist Yalom’s The Gift of Therapy
The Gift of Therapyby well-known pioneer Irvin D. Yalom, M.D. is subtitled “An open letter to a new generation of therapists and their patients.” First published in 2002, this new edition was published by Harper Perennial in 2009. The book contains 85 short chapters—some only a page long—of “tips for beginner therapists.” The chapters are useful and engaging; a few examples are “Avoid Diagnosis (Except for Insurance Companies),” “Let the Patient Matter to You,” “Acknowl - edge Your Errors,” and “Empathy: Looking Out the Patient’s Wind - ow,” “Beware the Occupational Hazards,” and “Cherish the Oc cu pa - tional Privileges.” While he advises drawing from a number of theo- retic approaches, Yalom defines himself as an “existential therapist”
working, as he says, from an interpersonal and existential frame of ref- erence. He has had a long clinical practice and writes about it in a per- sonal and useful manner. He calls his book a “nuts and bolts collection of favorite interventions . . . long on technique and short on theory”
(p. xxi). He cites Rilke’s Letters to a Young Poetas a model for its “hon- esty, inclusiveness and generosity of spirit” (p. xix).
Irvin Yalom is a Californian known for his many writings, includ- ing novels about therapy. In my days as a student, his The Theory and Practice of Group Psychotherapy was the bible for group therapy, and I suspect it is still a major influence today. I found The Gift of Therapyto be honest, inclusive, and with a generosity of spirit unusual in much writing for therapists today. Deceptively simple, it reveals a philoso- phy of therapy that is human, wise—and occasionally witty. It is charm- ing, informative, and meant to be read “in pieces” as needed and not straight through from beginning to end. In many ways, reading this book is like having an informal conversation with a master. We are lucky, indeed, that Yalom has given us this “gift.”
(KN) In my group art therapy course, most of us became enamored of Yalom both through the (video) recorded group therapy enactments we watched and also through his fiction, especially Love’s Executioner (1989).
The gift of therapy offers so much knowledge in such short bursts I typi- cally read just a chapter or two in a sitting. His words have a way of com- ing back to me when I need them.
A Good Book Is a Mentor 35 Pipher’s Letters to a Young Therapist
Mary Pipher is a Nebraska-based clinical psychologist who has prac ticed for 30 years. Her most well-known book, Reviving Ophelia, Saving the Selves of Adolescent Girls, was on many best-seller lists and became a movie. Pipher’s letters are written in the form of a dialogue between Pipher and her supervisee—“Laura.” Although Laura doesn’t really write back, in these letters, Pipher offers thoughts about her stu- dent’s work and her own, revisits her training, expresses evocative ideas about the state of contemporary psychotherapy and describes her profound engagement with the natural environment and the chang ing seasons, around her. She says:
Robert Frost wrote: “Education elevates trouble to a higher plane.”
So does psychotherapy. It is a way of exploring pain and confusion to produce meaning and hope. This book consists of lessons I’ve learned from the people who have tromped into my office and flopped down on my old couch for conversations . . .
Along with having sex, sleeping and sharing food, conversation is arguably one of the most basic of all human behaviors. Two or more people tell each other stories. They struggle to laugh and calm down . . . in the end, therapy consists of people talking things over.
(pps. xvii & xviii)
(KN) Yalom at times holds the archetype of the heroic therapist for me;
Pipher is unassuming in her wisdom, ferocity, and mothering. She offers examples from her own life woven into her encounters with clients. Her advice is common sense: get more exercise and see your friends.
The mentor/writers mentioned in this chapter, with the exception of Rogers, use the receptive student as a device to distill their wisdom and offer their gifts. And we students are hungry for that guidance! However, speaking directly about our own experience, as Rogers does, reveals that blend of self-doubt and overconfidence that typifies the novice therapist; it is a developmental stage, like childhood, that fades with experience. And though I know I am hoping for more comfortable times ahead, I also sus- pect the raw enthusiasm and bursting passion I feel so often may fade as well.
The stage I am in as a student will only exist this way for a short time before I become “seasoned.” I am glad to try and capture some of the fleet-
36 Becoming an Art Therapist
ing feelings that go with it as a comfort or point of departure for other stu- dents. And as a student, it is sustaining to have my experience mirrored back to me, and even more so to have experienced mentors ready on my bookshelf to quell my anxieties and give me faith and good advice.
Schroder’s Little Windows into Art Therapy, Small Openings for Beginning Therapists
Kim found McNiff’s Fundamentals of Art Therapyuseful and inspira- tional and will discuss it later in this chapter. Because I think and work from a more psychodynamic viewpoint as an art psychotherapist, not that of a shamanic art therapist as does Kim, I did not and do not expe- rience McNiff’s theories helpful for me, although I believe he is a won- derful writer. (Right here the reader encounters two quite different art therapists’ perspectives, not unusual in the field at all.) Opinions fol- lowing are mine; Kim experienced Schroder’s somewhat differently and will say so.
In my opinion, the Schroder book is worse than nothing because, it represents the field of art therapy poorly seeming to say “this is all of it” when it is not. I was sorry that Schroder did not acknowledge the obvious “art as therapy” philosophy on which her work is based.
While there can be much discussion and many arguments about the scope of art therapy, it is doubtful that one would argue that art ther- apy is not a complex and endlessly fascinating endeavor and an inno- vative and effective avenue for healing. Although the existence of so many different avenues and styles of art therapy practice can be detri- mental to achieving and portraying a stable identity for the field—one that can be portrayed to the mental health community and the public at large—the belief system in Little Windows is only one approach of many. This book strikes me as a paper probably originally done by a graduate student.
Schroder’s book appears to reside in Edith Kramer’s “art as thera- py” philosophy—an offshoot of arts education. Art therapists of this ilk develop creative art projects—and work like activity or recreation ther- apists. The therapist holding this particular theoretical philosophy believes that it is essential that the art therapist continuously does her own art and that it is the creative process itself that is healing. She has not learned to do psychotherapy and typically uses words sparingly, if at all. (I remember long ago, doing a workshop at an American Art
A Good Book Is a Mentor 37 Therapy Association. Attending my workshop were students who had come from a graduate program with this philosophy. They begged me to teach them how to talk in art therapy.) A graduate program within this particular theoretical bent tends to produce something like a psy- chologically informed art teacher. Many graduate programs today tend to fall into this theoretical category.
(KN) I have given my response to Schroder’s book below. I reread it and compared it to Malchiodi’s Sourcebook (1998; 2006) and find them to be comparable in approach. I am not comfortable coming down so hard as you are on her book. As you say, few resources are teaching a psychody- namic approach to art therapy and most seem heavy on directives.
KIM NEWALL: A STUDENT’S RECOMMENDATIONS THREE PLACES TO BEGIN
Before entering my graduate program in art therapy, I read a few books to get the feel of the field. The three I read were: The Art Therapy Sourcebook (1998; 2006) by Cathy Malchiodi, Fundamental of Art Therapy by Shaun McNiff (1988) and Little Windows Into Art Therapy(2005) by Deborah Schroder.
Malchiodi’s book took me deeply into processes and directives unique to art therapy and invited me to follow the directives and experience of the power of art therapy. I felt comfort and familiarity as I read and en - gaged in some of the directives because they felt similar to what had evolved in my studio environment over the course of my professional ca - reer as an artist.
In contrast, McNiff’s book took me deeply into the mystical and psy- chic depths of art and healing as he claimed the shaman’s role in the heal- ing enactments of the image and of art making. I responded to the mean- ing of the work he described, and to his passion for the image as living soul medicine. While I experienced Malchiodi’s text more as a how-to overview of techniques and processes, I experienced McNiff’s book as a call to dive into the spiritual dimensions of the image and to experience the power of transformation there. His dialogue process with the images themselves gave me a look into the more psychodynamic possibilities of the image and the therapeutic process.
Schroder’s Little Windows Into Art Therapy (2005) led me through the life of an art therapist more than the others. Her brief overview of working